First Video

Success! The system worked like a charm, except for some sporatic interference mainly due to me flying behind a hill which was blocking the video RX. Erik served as Ground-station Master General and manned all the electronics on the ground while I flew. We flew for about 15 minutes and captured a lot of great video. Since I didn't have a free channel to control the pan mount of the camera, I decided to couple the rudder to the camera movement. Unfortunately, the ratio of camera movement to rudder movement was far too small. This resulted in almost no pan ability because the massive rudder control threw the plane into death spins. Landing was 'interesting' as I tried to slow the plane down to a safe enough speed for Erik to catch it; unfortunately, in addition to my shoddy piloting skills, the heavy plane just wouldn't fly slow enough for a mid-air retrieval.